Naked Lunch–And Naked Midnight Snacks Too: How Sleeping Naked Can Benefit Your Health
In this harried age of chronic overwork, job insecurity, and economic disarray, we’ve all been subjected to that dreaded feeling of getting through the day on too little sleep.
You start the day bleary, unable to feel as if you’ve ever really women up, hoping that the morning coffee will somehow clear away the cobwebs–to no avail. Often that caffeine boost on too-little sleep just makes you more jittery without making you feel any better.
What’s worse, recent studies have elucidated just how fragile our emotions are to the depredations of lack of sleep. When your mother called you cranky when you woke up for school, she was probably right: adolescents rarely get enough sleep, and crankiness, moodiness, and irritability are all symptoms of lack of sleep–but so are feelings of anxiety and other emotional disturbances.
Indeed, quality sleep has been shown to remove toxic proteins from your brain’s neurons that are by products of waking neural activity. If they are not removed, they slow our ability to process information, kill our creativity, and ultimately decrease our intelligence.
Luckily, we have the answer–or what may at least be part of the answer: get naked.
Turns out that elusive quality sleep we are all so desperately in need of can be had–or at least we have a better chance at it–if you strip before bed.
A study at the University of Amsterdam discovered that by lowering skin temperature, you are able to increase the depth of your sleep. What’s more, a lowered skin temperature also reduces the amount of times we awaken in the night. Sleeping in your skin is a great way to lower that temperature.
Another benefit of sleeping well is lowered cortisol levels in our bodies. Cortisol is the so-called “stress hormone” that is thought to contribute to heart disease, depression, and obesity. Since sleeping naked has been proven to help you sleep better, lowered cortisol and therefore lower risk for the aforementioned ailments is an added benefit.
Hell, you can even lose weight by sleeping naked: keeping your body cooler while you sleep has been proven to increase your metabolism, thus burning more calories while you dream.
So if your partner asks why you are suddenly sleeping in the buff, tell them you trying to balance your emotional life, prevent heart disease, and lose weight.
And then maybe invite them to join you–that’s another way to reduce stress after all!
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-travis-bradberry/4-ways-sleeping-naked-mak_b_9548500.html